attest

ATTEST is a financial control layer that verifies AI-proposed actions before they can change financial state. Settlement reconciliation is the first workflow it does that for. The problem it addresses is that a payment gateway sends one lump sum covering many orders at once, minus fees, and somebody must establish what that credit was composed of. Where records carry an order-level reference, reconstruction is a join and easy. The hard case is when they do not, such as a bank credit reconciled against a statement rather than a gateway report, a period whose recon is unavailable, or an adjustment with no linked entity. There, composition must be derived from amounts, fees and dates, and more than one set of orders can add up to the same credit exactly.

ATTEST works through four layers: ADVISOR proposes investigative signals, VERIFIER independently reconstructs and proves the explanation, POLICY decides whether a proven result is safe to automate, and LEDGER records only permitted execution. The advisor is advisory only and cannot authorize financial action. It is given identifiers, names and dates and never an amount. The verifier recomputes the explanation from the source records without reading what the advisor said, and the ledger accepts nothing the verifier has not re-derived.

Measured results on held-out evaluation show exact set recovery 16.0%, coverage 16.8%, ambiguity rate 82.4%, proof precision 0.952, false proof rate 0.80%, and wrongly auto-posted ₹0.00. The system uses integer paise end to end, an independent 35-line checker, a policy gate, and adversarial testing with 35 attacks. Limitations include synthetic evaluation data, no live merchant money, and coverage of 16% rather than 90%.